“The hero in a ghost story laughs a nimble laugh” : The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts ou la réinvention du canon littéraire états-unien chez Maxine Hong Kingston

Introduction PART I: SETTING FORTH ISSUES AND DEBATES A Chinese Woman's Response to Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior The Most Popular Book in China Autobiography as Guided Chinatown Tour? Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior and the Chinese American Autobiography Controversy PART II: GENDER, GENRE, AND THEORY Filiality and Woman's Autobiographical Storytelling No Lost Paradise: Social Gender and Symbolic Gender in the Writings of Maxine Hong Kingston PART III: A CHINESE AMERICAN TRADITION IN AN ERA OF MULTICULTURALISM The Woman Warrior versus the Chinaman Pacific: Must a Chinese American Critic Choose between Feminism and Heroism? Chinese American Women Writers: The Tradition behind Maxine Hong Kingston Intelligibility and Meaningfulness in Multicultural Literature in English (Excerpts) PART IV: AN INTERVIEW Susan Brownmiller Talks with Maxine Hong Kingston, Author of The Woman Warrior Annotated Select Bibliography Bibliography

One of the most widely taught books in American colleges in recent years, Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior has a vexed reception history that both attests to its popularity and questions it. (1) The debates regarding Kingston's text that flared up immediately after the book's publication primarily concerned authenticity and representation. (2) These conflicts centered on whether Kingston's representation of Chinese culture and Chinese Americans was faithful. While the debates over authenticity and representation have subsided, the questions raised regarding the representation of a minority still find their way into recent scholarship on The Woman Warrior, if in varying forms. (3) This essay focuses on a key figure from Kingston's text--tongue-cutting--because it embodies a key concern raised by critics of The Woman Warrior: does Kingston misrepresent the Chinese American community as barbaric while accommodating the mainstream readership's expectations for Orientalist tales. (4) Because of its physicality and violence, tongue-cutting runs the risk of being inscrutable when approached within a narrow set of definitions of civilization and its norms. Perhaps the easiest way to take care of this problem is to regard the tongue-cutting in Kingston's text as fictional, as an exercise of Kingston's creative imagination. The impressive work that has been done so far on Kingston's innovative use of genre in The Woman Warrior supports such a reading. (5) Viewing Kingston's text as a memoir in the traditional sense is now largely discredited. However, while The Woman Warrior does not ask for a sorting out of fact from fiction, too hastily labeling as fictional every incident in the text that potentially signals intercultural tension does not help understand Kingston's sophisticated manipulation of reality and imagination. To explore the figure of tongue-cutting in the text as it marks a crucial intersection between the body and language is to take a step further from the debates over representation and to think about how Kingston's text interconnects social reality and the material conditions of life. A recent article in The Houston Chronicle, also on tongue-cutting, serves as a point of entry into the relation between language and the body in The Woman Warrior. The October 19, 2003, issue of The Houston Chronicle reported the case of tongue-cutting among school-age children in Korea, prompted by their zealous parents who wanted their children to acquire full proficiency in English. Chop a centimeter or so off your tongue and become a fluent English speaker reads the first line of this arresting newspaper article (Korean). Tongue-cutting, in the Korean case, takes place as a result of a misconstrued relationship between language and the body. Parents believe that there is an optimum mouth structure for unlimited language capacity, and they couple this with a misplaced faith that modern medicine can produce an optimum bodily organ through surgery. Such thinking ties together the body and language in a simplistic cause-and-effect relationship. While The Woman Warrior debunks the idea that there can be a causal relationship between language and the body, it grapples with the question of what it means for a racialized body to acquire a language. By showing how the body's racial marker precedes language performance, Kingston dismantles an easy distinction between language ability and and makes the reader aware that language is always intimately linked to the body that speaks and the material conditions of that body. I borrow from recent scholarship on studies to think through the shifting bases of ability and and to examine the role of the body--both the exterior that is visible and the interior that is not so readily visible--in the subject's self-perception and social acceptance. A social constructionist view of disability, the view that disability is neither 'natural' nor essential but rather that it is socially produced has made it possible to see how and ability are in fact mutually constitutive (Marks 78). …

<p>Since its publication in 1976, Maxine Hong Kingston’s <em>The Woman Warrior</em> has aroused widespread concerns and discussions in both China and abroad. This book is regarded as the pioneering work of Contemporary Chinese American literature and a masterpiece of feminism, relevant research serves to figure out the dilemma from which the Chinese American females suffered, as well as their struggle to fight against the racial and sexual discrimination attached to them. The present study is concerned with the identity of the Chinese Americans represented by Kingston herself as well as the author’s purport of adapting ancient Chinese tales, while ignoring the process of the protagonist’s self-awakening and how she employed narration to reconstruct her identity and getting access to education and power. This paper will focus on the therapeutic properties of narration in <em>The Woman Warrior</em> with the assistance of transitivity analysis, which illustrates that transitivity can reveal a character’s thinking pattern and that narration can help the narrator perceive the world in a more positive way and gain the necessary strength to fight for her own rights.</p>

Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts explores the theme of identity friction and the dilemma of hyphenated immigrants among Chinese Americans in the nation of nationsμ (Behdad, p. 113). Kingston demonstrates the discourse of exclusion with the Chinese Americans who have settled in America due to the phenomenon known as the Gold Rushμ in America. This paper will lay emphasis on Kingston˙s own aunt, Moon Orchid who travels to America after thirty years to meet her husband and claim her position as his wife. The poignant rejection by her husband, who has totally become an "American" by creating an American identity for himself, rejects his Chinese wife after getting an American wife. The novel speaks of the disappointments of the Chinese American migration from China, the Gold Mountainμ of America. Kingston has worked hard and struggled to give meaning and voice to the marginalised community to the women like her mother and aunts. This paper will delve into the concept of "foreigner-within" (Lowe, p.5) among the Chinese American and the dilemma of identity in the foreign land. It will also explore the complex ways in which immigrants understand the notions of 'identity' and 'home in the adopted land. The racial and cultural differences experienced by the Chinese Americans in a "forgetful nation" (Behdad, p. xiii) is a painful experience. Kingston narrates all these difficult times through a new narrative form that she has discovered and that is the "talk-stories". Through the talk-stories she narrates stories of oppressions that ultimately becomes stories of defiance and through this device the dilemma of identity and the concept of "foreigner-within" will be articulated in this paper.

Chinese Americans are a group which shows the feature of cultural hybridity, and The Woman Warrior describes the life experience of a Chinese girl in a foreign land and her imagination of her distant homeland. From the perspective of post-colonialism, cultural identity is gradually constructed and changed. The Woman Warrior translates some Chinese images into English shows the construction of cultural identity which is different from the mainstream culture. The translation strategies adopted by the novel can be divided into domesticating translation and foreignizing translation. The two translation methods have different characteristics and play different roles in the construction of cultural identity. This article adopts post-colonial theory, cultural identity theory and translation strategy theory to analyze the characteristics of domesticating translation and foreignizing translation in The Woman Warrior, and explores translation strategies that are more conducive to the construction of cultural identity through comparison. Finally, it is concluded that foreignizing translation is a more effective translation strategy under the premise of constructing cultural identity.

The dehumanization of whiteness in Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior (1976) inheres in the overarching ghosthood metaphor. While first generation Chinese American immigrants in The Woman Warrior attribute the power of transforming people into ghosts to the United States of America as a country, the questioning of a person’s humanity by calling them a “ghost” is not reserved for white people alone. Chinese American immigrants also run the risk of losing their humanity and becoming ghosts if they renounce their relatives and their heritage. The husband of the first-person narrator’s Chinese aunt, Moon Orchid, is an example of a Chinese American man, who turns into a ghost on account of swapping his Chinese wife for a much younger American one. The clinic in which Moon Orchid’s husband works, a chrome and glass Los Angeles skyscraper, becomes a vehicle for the metaphoric representation of the United States as the Western Palace – also the title of the fourth of the five chapters of The Woman Warrior, exemplifying narrative techniques employed by Kingston in order to render the above mentioned dehumanization.

Reviewed by: Mulan’s Legend and Legacy in China and the United States by Lan Dong Crystal S. Anderson Mulan’s Legend and Legacy in China and the United States. By Lan Dong. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. 2011. The figure of Mulan, the young Chinese girl who takes her father’s place in the military by disguising herself as a man, has become one of the most recognizable characters from the Chinese cultural tradition. Through an examination of Chinese [End Page 196] ballads and history, Chinese American novels, children’s picture books and animated features, the book traces its repeated transformations as it moves from historical China to the contemporary United States. Dong’s book parses the meaning of Mulan’s Chinese origins through an exploration of a Chinese female heroic tradition represented by the many women who served in military capacities and were celebrated as female heroes. It makes the compelling argument that the heroism demonstrated by each of these women “is still well defined within the Confucian doctrine because her conduct consistently adheres to such core principles as loyalty or filial piety or both,” making it “possible for a woman to disrupt social norms by crossing the boundaries defining gender roles without incurring severe punishment” (13). Such an argument intervenes in scholarly discourse that defines Chinese heroism in popular culture in overwhelmingly male terms, such as John Christopher Hamm’s Paper Swordsmen: Jin Yong and the Modern Chinese Martial Arts Novel and Stephen Teo’s Chinese Martial Arts Cinema: The Wuxia Tradition. This historical backstory on a female Chinese heroic tradition provides context for later transformations in Chinese American cultural production. Dong sees Chinese American writer Maxine Hong Kingston’s treatment of the figure in her novel The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts as another phase of the transformation of Mulan within the United States. Kingston seeks to create a viable model for Chinese American women caught between American and Chinese cultures. While the historical antecedents and previous literary versions of Mulan negotiate Confucian values using a Chinese female heroic tradition, Dong argues that Kingston ultimately casts the warrior aside, viewing her as ineffective for the contemporary Chinese American woman. The inability for Mulan to function as warrior in a contemporary context seems to contradict her multivalent origins in the Chinese heroic and historical tradition. For Kingston, the woman warrior represents a phase through which the Mulan character passes on her way to a more effective way of dealing with her environment. A transnational feminist lens comes more to bear in the discussion of Disney’s treatment of Mulan in animated form. Dong argues that Disney’s Mulan sacrifices elements central to her character in the Chinese source material, such as seeking justice, in order to appeal to a global audience. Dong suggests such efforts to make a cross-cultural film, such as including iconic images such as The Great Wall of China, are superficial at best because they use clichéd elements of Chinese culture. Such choices fail to resonate with Chinese audiences who may “interpret the film as an imperialistic appropriation and distortion of Chinese culture” and ultimately “presents a hybrid product that is neither Chinese nor American” (173–4). In mapping the convoluted trajectory of the Mulan figure, this book adds significantly to transnational American studies by showing the necessity of knowledges of both American and Chinese cultures for the hybrid figure. [End Page 197] Crystal S. Anderson Elon University Copyright © 2012 Mid-America American Studies Association

“Silence” is a form of “being invisible”. It occupies an important position in “non-native” women writers’ works in the United States. While focusing on the silence in Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts and Amy Tan’s The Kitchen God’s Wife, this study attempts to explore and reveal the conflicts hidden behind silence: the conflict between genders, the conflict between races, and the conflict between Chinese culture and American one. In The Woman Warrior, the narrator’s father and mother’s silence about and prohibition of the mention of the no-name aunt are reflections of the ideology of the patriarchal world; the conflict between races is revealed in the silence of the narrator in American schools, and in her whisper before the bosses who are racists. In The Kitchen God’s Wife, Winnie’s secret about her past and her silence about her husband’s wrong doings show her contempt and disillusionment of the whole patriarchal society. The obstruction in the communication between the narrator and her mother in The Woman Warrior and the silence between Winnie and her daughter, Pearl in The Kitchen God’s Wife are not only a problem of generation gap, but more importantly, the great differences between two cultures: mother represents Chinese culture while daughter the American one. The analysis shows that in order to solve the conflicts, women characters not only have to break silence, but also assert their subjectivity and acknowledge both the self and the other. Relying on Jessica Benjamin’s theory on intersubjectivity, this paper asserts that equal and successful communication between genders, races and cultures can be achieved through the construction of intersubjectivity.

The scientific breakthroughs of important theorists such as Sigmund Freud, Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault, etc., engendered a new concept of subject. Instead of the centered and integrated Cartesian subject, the postmodern individual is fragmented and multiple, affected by ideology and by his/her unconscious. This makes it necessary to analyze the historical and psychological dimensions to apprehend his/her complexity. In Maxine Hong Kingston’s The woman warrior — memoirs of a girlhood among ghosts, first published in 1976, it is possible to identify the multiple subject positionings of the main character, who is also the narrator. As a North American of Chinese descent, she portrays Chinese legends, myths, and family stories of her ethnic community through an American frame of mind. Growing up in the intersection of cultures, a position of in-between cultures, and having to deal with different customs and values, the narrator faces conflicts and paradoxes. Her contradictory and fragmentary identity reveals the hybrid and diasporic character of the Chinese American author. Kingston constantly brings together the discourses of her Chinese cultural heritage and the American ones presented in her environment. With this constant dialogue between different cultural elements, the narrator tries to forge a sense of wholeness, a unified cultural identity, of her various subjective positions. The result of this effort, however, is a culturally unstable identity: The woman warrior reflects the heterogeneous nature of the main character and the author, revealing to the reader the Chinese American “country” and culture in all its singularity and uniqueness. The theoretical framework used to analyze the different expressions of subjectivity in the main character of this fictional autobiography is based on critics of Postmodernism and on cultural studies about diasporas.

In The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts, Maxine Hong Kingston tells the story of her immigrant family and their efforts to rise above their working-class status in America, which optimistic Chinese regard as the Golden Mountain. The Hongs' experience is not unlike that of other immigrants who come to America to escape hardship in their homeland and hope to live the American Dream. The road to American success has numerous obstacles, and immigrants encounter many conflicts on their journey. One conflict relates to their cultural identities. Gloria Anzaldúa uses the word “borderland” to refer to the meeting of two cultures, and she defines the borderland as a “place of contradictions. Hatred, anger and exploitation are the prominent features of this landscape” (n.p.). While Anzaldua's discussion focuses on the borderland encountered by Mexican Americans, she believes that many share this painful experience:

German in origin, the Bildungsroman is a novelistic genre that refers to narratives that deal with the process of formation and development of its protagonist from childhood to adolescence. The Bildungsroman has been evolving and adjusting itself to new historical, social and literary concerns and a significant shift seems to be taking place in the area of family dynamics, particularly in the case of immigrant Bildungsroman. The rise of feminist, post-colonial and minority studies during the 1980s and 1990s broadened the definition and approach to Bildungsroman resulting in unprecedented increase in female Bildungsroman. Many emerging post-colonial writers are women and have migrant backgrounds and their personal experiences of migration are translated into their works, which have come to serve as metaphors for identity reconstruction. Filial relationships, mother–daughter relationship in particular, are an important theme in ethnic female Bildungsroman The Woman Warrior (WW). This article examines how the mother–daughter relationship in female Bildungsroman The WW marks significant departures from the conventional Bildungsroman – how the protagonist reinscribes herself within her parents’ culture by tracing the descent line of her Chinese–American, female, artistic self through her mother while at the same time reinscribing that culture into an American context; how the shared experience between Brave Orchid and her daughter as marginalized women in racist American society is used to forge an exalting relationship.

The relationship between humans and their gods has always been a primary theme in literature. Until recently, however, books in the American literary canon have rarely been concerned with any supernatural beings other than the Judeo-Christian god. In this book Bonnie Winsbro moves beyond that narrow focus to examine the power of the supernatural in the works of six ethnic writers: Lee Smith's Oral History, Louise Erdrich's Tracks, Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony, Gloria Naylor's Mama Day, Toni Morrison's Beloved, and Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts. By selecting these authors, Winsbro provides a multicultural perspective - Appalachian, Native American, African American, and Chinese American - on the internal turmoil experienced by ethnic individuals when their belief systems clash with those of family, community, or dominant culture. Although their responses to such conflicts differ, Winsbro argues, all six authors believe that personal power is acquired through self-definition, the process by which one constructs one's own reality as a foundation for living in one's own center rather than on another's margins. By analyzing works that treat seriously a belief in such supernatural figures as witches, healers, and ghosts, Winsbro seeks to show that the contemporary world is not defined by one reality - a rationalistic, scientific reality, for example, or a Judeo-Christian reality - but by many realities. Indeed, acknowledging the coexistence, collision, and coalescence of multiple realities is one of the distinguishing features of postmodern life.

Maxine Hong Kingston is one of the most famous female Chinese American writers in 20th century. Her famous novel The Woman Warrior confirmed her status in American literature. The novel describes the heroine’s life as a Chinese American and depicts the psychological course and conflict when confronting the pressure from both gender and culture. This book indicates Kingston’s pursuit of the harmony and balance in a variety of aspects. This paper mainly focuses on the harmony and balance between East and West. The first part deals with the theme of mother and daughter’s relation, in which the mother represents the traditional Chinese culture while the daughter struggles among the conflicts of eastern and western culture. Secondly, the novel conveys the ethnic women’s appeal by talking about the texts of the novel. The author also reveals the Chinese Americans’ pursuit of self-identity. Kingston was writing with an intense aspiration of speaking for the Chinese. The third part is the theme of silence and articulation in which Kingston tries to reconstruct their identity by breaking up the silence and articulating their appeal. Kingston also put forward a dream of globalization and unity in her novel.

The potential confrontation of Oriental and Occidental values represents\n\none of the most important topics of scholarship since the twentieth century.\n\nWithin this debate, American-born Chinese female writers occupy a unique\n\nposition in their preoccupation with the two seemingly irreconcilable cultures.\n\nOn the one hand, their Western upbringings entices the distortion of China from\n\nan Orientalistic perspective, on the other hand, they find their desire to come to\n\nterms with their ethnic cultural heritage to be equally difficult to supplant. It is a\n\ndilemma which sparked conflicts even within the Chinese American community,\n\nand begs the redefinition of the Chinese American female identity.\n\nIt is thus, by applying Simone de Beauvoir’s ethical notions about\n\nSelf/Other relations to the writings of Chinese American female writers, I\n\nconsider how subjectivity is not substantive but a situated experience of selfhood\n\nin movement, and argue that Chinese American female writers may still be\n\ninternalizing and perpetuating oriental stereotypes in their works, when they too\n\nhave started re-orienting and hence, re-orientalising China and their Chinese\n\nidentity. The United States of America is to Chinese American women as\n\nalienated at times as China. Under the framework, I further consider the futility\n\nof disputing the dual identity of Chinese American female writers to the extent\n\nto which identity can be considered as an ambivalent and ambiguous notion that\n\nhas a temporal element in it.\n\nAs a writer writes first and foremost about his or her own singular\n\nexperiences in relation to the world, this thesis tackles the above question by\n\nexamining how elements of anguish, solitude, and death, as noted by Beauvoir,\n\nand that are often present in Chinese American female writers’ accounts of their\n\nsingular experiences, connect them to others. Through the evocation of such\n\nelements to establish the connection between Self and Other, which constitutes\n\nthe authenticity of self-expression as opposed to suppression of self-assertion,\n\none’s struggle with separation and one’s own truth is represented. In this sense, it\n\nis not, the ultimate result or triumph of an individual’s struggle with unity or\n\nindividuality that matters; but rather, the process of self-struggle that\n\ncorresponds to the dignified human existence within Beauvoir’s philosophical\n\nframework.\n\nThe three elements of situation anguish, death and solitude are dealt with in\n\nthis project in the following context: in Chapter Two, Ann Mah’s anguish over\n\nChinese and American food is examined in connotation to the relations of herself\n\nwith others around her that coerces her to reflect upon her ethnic and cultural\n\naffiliations. In Chapter Three, death is explored through the discussion of the\n\nfootbinding notion in which the death of the foot signifies the end of docile\n\nacceptance as well as the beginning of transformations. Solitude is elucidated in\n\nChapter Four through Maxine Hong Kingston’s warrior woman\n\nconceptualization that adopts and later re-orientalises silence. In all three\n\nsituations, I pay attention to the way re-orientalisation is achieved in the Chinese\n\nAmerican female project of selfhood in movement towards the Other.

Genre-Crossing: Kingston's The Woman Warrior and its Discursive Community Hsiu-chuan Lee This paper seeks to explore the potential of an individual's practice of writing/speaking to be politically ductive. Taking and culturally pro- Maxine Hong Kingston's controversial book The Woman I Warrior: Memoirs ofa Girlhood Amottg Ghosts (1976) as a case, will study the problematics of textual circulation dealt with in the book as well as the way in which it dramatically reflects the discursive transmission/ interpretation taking place around the book. There are two reasons to choose The of investigation: First, as one of the Woman Warrior as a text most widely read and talked about anthologized texts among contemporary literary works. The Woman Warrior's circulation enacts a discursive It is community cross- taught in courses ing the boundaries of genres/disciplines.^ and departments ranging from composition, American culture, ethnic studies, women's studies, and popular culture to postmodernism and serves as rhetorical model, autobiography, biography and even historiography. Second, not only does a multi-generic discursive community ensue from the reading and the transmission of The Woman Warrior; but the book itself is concerned with the problematics of textual circulation. In a sense, the telling and re-telling of stories in The Woman Warrior dramati- cally reflect the discursive transmission/interpretation taking place outside the book. While each the myth /story /memory in The Woman totaliz- Warrior branches into divergent interpretations, the narrative of book as a whole similarly leads not to a self-contained, ing authorship, but to a dialogical and historical cognition. Indeed, as the interpretive history of The Woman Warrior inscribed is by the development of contemporary feminist, ethnic, postmodern and, particularly, Chinese American aesthetic dis- courses, the multiple discursive voices inside the book are corre- lated with a Chinese immigrant history. As revealed in the trans- mission of the no-name woman story. The Woman Warrior em- bodies at least three different viewpoints of immigrant Chinese and /or Chinese Americans: the viewpoint of the Chinese left behind by their relatives and friends immigrating to the U.S., that